My take is that, for productive work, language is much less important than everything around it. I need at the very least some kind of package management and dependency resolution system. Sometimes I want to read a CSV file, turn some of the content into JSON and serve it over HTTP. In an environment with sensible libraries, that's just a case of glueing stuff together. The problem is not little languages, it's little ecosystems.
yeah I mean the price of 0$/€/any currency. And not all languages were free, especially one of the main place where python encountered first the success that made it so big was in the universities and in research, were software like matlab, mathematica, IDL or maple were (very expensive) kings before.